The Great Unsettling: A Briefing for the End of the World as We Knew It - Paul James
Date: Thursday, 29 August 2019
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EZ.G.23, Female Orphan School, Parramatta South campus, Western Sydney University
The Great Unsettling: A Briefing for the End of the World as We Knew It
Presenter: Professor Paul James (Institute for Culture and Society)
Discussant: Professor Brett Neilson
Abstract
The concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ is now everywhere— hailed, contested, and normalised— even before it has been universally adopted. In one of the earliest non-official announcement stories, the Economist in 2011 showed a ‘Spaceship Globe’, splitting at its seams. ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ said the headline: ‘Humans have changed the way the world works. Now they have to change the way they think about it, too’. Thus, a decade on from when— following Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s (2000) intervention— the term first took off, even a pro-capitalist, pro-globalisation business magazine acutely understood the broad consequences of the concept. For all of its evocative power, however, the concept of ‘the Anthropocene’ barely gets at the kinds of changes that are happening to humans and the planet. For all of its apparent breadth, the concept reduces the human impact to its ecological expressions and fails to consider the changing nature of social relations, including the impact of the planet upon humans. What kind of world are we living on? Why are its dominant trends so hard to characterise? In this talk, I want to address a series of qualitative transformations that add up to what might be called ‘The Great Unsettling’.
Biography
Professor Paul James is Director of the Institute for Culture and Society. He is Scientific Advisor to the Mayor of Berlin, and a Metropolis Ambassador of Urban Innovation. He is an editor of Arena Journal and author or editor of over 30 books including Globalization Matters with Manfred Steger (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism (Sage). Other books include 16 volumes mapping the field of globalisation (Sage). That collection is the most comprehensive and systematic representation of the field of globalisation studies, comprising 7,000 pages or 3.5 million words. He has been an advisor to a number of agencies and governments including the Canadian Prime Minister’s G20 Forum, and the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor. His work for the Papua New Guinea Minister for Community Development became the basis for their Integrated Community Development Policy. From 2007 till 2014 he was Director of the United Nations agency, the Global Compact Cities Programme.
